No-Shows

A fascinating subject? No, but one capable of arousing strong emotion, particularly in smaller restaurants where no-shows can make the difference between profit and loss. Some while ago, there was a story in the trade that a restaurateur rang at 3 a.m. the number of a booking which had failed to arrive and asked if they minded if he let his staff go home now. Sometimes I feel so exercised by this question that I’m almost ready to stay up till 3 a.m. Certainly if he had managed to speak to somebody at the end of the line that would have been an achievement in itself. More often than not, the contact number we all take with bookings is, for no shows, a dud, especially if the name attached to it is, for example, Roland Butter, C. Lion, or Michael Hunt (it’s time he changed his pseudonym), and believe it or not bookings under these names do get taken (OK, maybe we deserve it if we fall for those tricks). However, my apologies to S. Tinker who turned out not to be one after all.